Life is simple, Swim, Bike, Run!

As if by magic, having complained about the latest Garmin software required for uploading data from the Garmin 310 XT watch, I raced Lake Pflugerville Triathlon on Sunday, and as I came out of the swim looked down to press the lap button and the watch face was full of water...

Garmin have a pretty decent exchange program(see my earlier entry), for both in warranty and out of warranty devices. For in warranty, it's a flat fee of $50, so if you drop it or crash on a reasonably new device, $50. I've had the 310XT since I think about 2010. I've exchanged it twice already. Once a couple of weeks after getting it when I dropped it and the glass broke, and a 2nd time when it died. A 3rd exchange would cost $99.

I briefly considered other devices, I especially like the Polar V800, and I ran through numerous uses of the outstanding DC Rainmaker product comparison grid before deciding to follow Chris Rains suggestion to get a Fenix 3. Right about the same time, Blake txt'd me to point out that I could get a 40% discount from Garmin.com. Done.

The Fenix 3 is a big watch, the face is huge and it's heavy to wear, but I love it. I may get around to doing a review, but its probably not worth the typing time now since the web and youtube are full of them.

So, excited as I was to actually go to the pool and try the Fenix 3 out this morning, I was disappointed to find out that there seems to be no way to get the data off the Fenix 3 except through the aforementioned Garmin Express which upoads to Garmin Connect. Garmin sell software developers a key to allow them to sync data from the Garmin cloud into their application.

I really only want the data in Sporttracks desktop Windows app that I've been using since 2009. In the old days you just imported it directly from the device, no more. Get to the data into Sporttracks desktop app, it now goes from

To get data from a device plugged into my PC the data has to transverse the Internet 3-times. As a software architect, thats simply just mad and terrible design. It's also bound to fail regularly, and suffer from availability problems. It also requires me to have a paid subscription to sporttracks.mobi for no other reason than to sync the data from Garmin Connect to the sporttrack desktop app.(if anyone from Zone Five Software ever reads this and wants to comment, I'll happily tell you why I didn't renew my paid subscription to sporttracks.mobi).

I checked on Garmin Connect, and they do have a export option. So figured maybe I could just download and import, and even though I'm logged in, I get a 403 error, not authorised from garmin.com. Sigh. My bad after all for buying a Fenix 3 without checking first. Or maybe I just need to stop using Sporttracks?